A Freudian Analysis Of Willy Loman’s Tragedy In Death Of A Salesman

Arthur Miller was one of the most important American playwrights of the 20 th century.Miller has created characters whose voices are an important part of the Americans’ daily lives.He is one of the most outstanding American playwrights, and his works are spread widely.As one of Miller’s masterpieces, Death of a Salesman tells a story about an ordinary man Willy Loman, who suffers a lot and leads a painful life because of the inner conflict in order to satisfy the inner desire and make his own American dream come true. At the end of the play,Willy Loman commits suicide. Miller displayed his complex psychological struggle and heavy pressure coming from the id’s desire and real world.To be sure, Willy Loman’s tragic end is caused by many factors and this thesis aims to probe into the inner causes of his tragedy from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the introduction part of this thesis, it briefly introduces the playwright Arthur Miller and the drama Death of a Salesman, the literature review of the play and the research objective and significance of this thesis. The body gives a brief account of Freudian theory related to Death of a Salesman,which consists of the structural model of personality and defense mechanisms. Then it explores Willy Loman’s personality structure and the defense mechanisms he adopted respectively. Under the drive of social success, Willy tries to achieve a successful career. On the way to domestic love, he tends to enjoy wife Linda’s love, children’s respect and other women’s tender care. In fact, his ego is so weak that it could not control the strong id. To some extent, his superego is like a huge mountain, putting too much pressure on himself. Although his ego adopts many defense mechanisms such as isolation, denial and fantasy, it does not work successfully. At last, this thesis summarizes the previous ideas and points out that the root cause of Willy Loman’s tragedy is his unhealthy personality structure. In addition to the social, historical and cultural reasons, his personal defects are major causes for his failure of struggle. Because of his own limitations, all his efforts are doomed to be fruitless.The aim of the thesis is to remind people to realize that only by self-acknowledging and confronting one’s inner world bravely can an individual obtain a healthy and steady development.Thus, this thesis is meaningful not only for its literary but also for its significance in reality.